Quantenna, has announced a new 802.11ac QSR1000 chip that is capable of delivering up to 1.7Gbps throughput. The new chip achieves the wireless throughput by supporting a combination of Multi-User MIMO, four spatial streams, 256-QAM modulation, and beamforming technology. More information on 802.11ac and the related technologies can be found here.

The Quantenna chip is a competitor to Broadcom's offerings and it is intended for use in wireless routers, access points, Set Top Boxes (STB), and other consumer electronics gear. It is the first "wave 2" (second iteration of the 802.11ac specification) 802.11ac chip, and is the fastest so far. Quantenna was able to get a theoretical max of 435.2Mbps of throughput per spatial stream, which is pretty impressive. Unfortunately, client devices (computers, smartphones, tablets, et al) will also have to support the MU-MIMO technology and have the hardware to transmit and receive multiple streams to take full advantage of the 1.7Gbps max throughput.

There is no word on which upcoming wireless devices the Quantenna chip will be used in, but the company is making the new QSR1000 chip available to manufacturers as early as Q3 of this year. Actual routers and other gear using the chip and widely available to consumers will likely not hit the market until early next year, however.

A new piece of networking hardware from PowerCloud Systems recently emerged on popular crowd-funding site Kickstarter. Aimed at consumers, the Skydog router is paired with a web interface and mobile application that makes managing your home network extremely accessible.

The Skydog router hardware itself has already passed regulatory certifications, and the super early bird backers will each get one of 250 pre-production units. The router features five Gigabit Ethernet ports (one port is for the WAN), a USB port, and a dual-band 802.11n Wi-Fi radio. The Wi-Fi radio can operate on the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands simultaneously, and has a maximum rated throughput of 300Mbps per band. The router chassis measures 17 x 11 x 2.5cm and includes a number of blue indicator LEDs on the top-front edge. The USB port is not currently supported, but is there for future feature updates.

Where Skydog differentiates itself from the crowd is in the software. After connecting the router to your modem and computers, you can log into the web interface. It will prompt you for either a Google or Skydog account, and then will reportedly automatically configure itself. The software supports Quality of Service (QoS) features that will allow you to prioritize certain traffic and/or to give bandwidth priority to certain users. The web interface will show you network statistics, connected devices, device signal strength, track and notify users of network issues (for example, the internet going down) via the Skydog mobile app, and track and restrict the websites users visit. Further, the administrator can set up schedules on a per-user basis. The schedules can restrict usage by approved time slices and by bandwidth limits. It will notify users when they are approaching the allotted time or bandwidth limit via the mobile app. Real time notifications include ISP connection issues, guests requesting access to the network, and the above-mentioned bandwidth limit notifications.

According to the Kickstarter FAQ, the Skydog Home Network (which consists of the router and management software) will cost approximately $149 for three years or $199 for five years without a monthly fee. The wording suggests that a model with a lower hardware cost but monthly charge might also be available. The cloud service is a bit worrisome, and I'm not sure if I like the idea of essentially renting the router via monthly or yearly fees. This router is not going to be for everyone, but it does have some useful and inventive features for families. This would be a router that I could see the various ISPs offering up as a rental device and that I might set up for my friends or relatives with kids so that they could easily manage the network and restrict the kids access to certain times of the day and age appropriate sites.

With 29 days left in the Kickstarter, the project has 543 backers, and $51,905 pledged of the 75,000 goal. It certainly looks like it is going to be funded, and I hope that the Kickstarter leads to a successful retail product launch.

MSI says “JUST GAME!”... but... I must write up their announcement first...

The computer components company would like us to “JUST GAME!” on their gaming motherboards, of course. This press release is for the MSI Killer Z77 gaming motherboard. The board supports the DDR3-3000, Creative Sound Blaster Cinema with Crystalizer, OC Genie II, and Military Class III initiatives.

But to call yourself Killer, you got some big shoes to fill.

Yes MSI, we get it. Challenge accepted.

What makes it a “Killer” announcement is the addition of a Killer E2200 LAN chip from Qualcomm's Bigfoot Networks. We have a fair amount of experience with the gamer networking hardware company; Ryan wrote a review all the way back in 2006. Since then, the company found themselves scooped up by Qualcomm where they found their technology integrated into motherboards from various manufacturers. They have also dabbled into wireless technology.

MSI proclaims with the E2200 LAN chip, their motherboard will have to use less space to house the chip when compared to the earlier Killer E2100. Also, for users running Windows 8, the E2200 was designed to support that operating system. Linux gamers? You too, but not until the second half of 2013.

The point which stuck with me most throughout the entire interview was directed at Valve’s opinion of gaming on connected screens. Gabe Newell responded,

The Steam Box will also be a server. Any PC can serve multiple monitors, so over time, the next-generation (post-Kepler) you can have one GPU that’s serving up eight simulateneous [sic] game calls. So you could have one PC and eight televisions and eight controllers and everybody getting great performance out of it. We’re used to having one monitor, or two monitors -- now we’re saying lets expand that a little bit.

This is pretty much confirmation, assuming no transcription errors on the part of The Verge, that Maxwell will support the virtualization features of GK110 and bring it mainstream. This also makes NVIDIA Grid make much more sense in the long term. Perhaps NVIDIA will provide some flavor of a Grid server for households directly?

The concept gets me particularly excited. One of the biggest wastes of money the tech industry has is purchasing redundant hardware. Consoles are a perfect example: not only is the system redundant to your other computational device which is usually at worst a $200 GPU away from a completely better experience, you pay for software to be reliant on that redundant platform which will eventually disappear along with said software. In fact, many have multiple redundant consoles because the list of software they desire is not localized to just one system so they need redundant redundancies. Oy!

A gaming server should help make the redundancy argument more obvious. If you need extra interfaces then you should only need to purchase the extra interfaces. Share the number crunching and only keep it up to date.

The newest member member of the Corsair Voyager family of devices, the Voyager Air, drives Corsair's entry into the home networking arena with their all-in-one mobile drive and home NAS (network attached storage) solution.

Courtesy of Corsair

The Voyager Air is as versatile as it is sleek, with support for the following hiding beneath its stylish hood:

Up to 1TB capacity drive

Rechargeable battery

Wi-Fi (802.11n/b/g), GigE Ethernet, and USB 3.0 support built-in

Wireless hub support for shared internet support via passthrough technology

Courtesy of Corsair

The Voyager Air comes in a variety of colors as well, more than enough to match anyone's sense of style. According to Corsair, the Voyager Air units should be accessible at an electronics retailer near you in a 500GB model for $179.99 MRSP and a 1TB model for $219.99 MSRP.

It's that time of year - the staff at PC Perspective is loaded up and either already here in Las Vegas, on their way to Las Vegas or studiously sitting at their desk at home - for the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show! I know you are on our site looking for all the latest computer hardware news from the show and we will have it. The best place to keep checking is our CES landing page at http://pcper.com/ces. The home page will work too.

We'll have stories covering companies like, Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte, Zotac, Sapphire, Galaxy, EVGA, Lucid, OCZ, Western Digital, Corsair and many many more that I don't feel like listing here. It all starts Sunday with CES Unveiled and then the NVIDIA Press Conference where they will announce...something.

With CES right around the corner, we’re about to be buried in a deluge of announcements from consumer electronics vendors. Since I was not able to get out to CES in person this year, Qualcomm offered to give me a sneak peek at their new “Streamboost” technology they’ve just announced and will be showing at CES. I got to spend some time on the phone with Ciera Jammal, their PR rep and Michael Cubbage, Director of Business Development in their networking unit. For those of you that may not recognize Michael’s name, he was one of the co-founders of Bigfoot Networks that brought us their “Killer Gaming” line of Ethernet and wireless products. Acquired by Qualcomm in the fall of 2011, the merged Bigfoot and Qualcomm teams have now released “Streamboost”.

So, what is Streamboost you ask? Simply put, it’s an innovative Quality of Service engine that’s much, much more than what’s available for consumer QoS today. QoS on most current consumer products only looks at what ports traffic is flowing across and prioritizes the traffic based on a simple list of what ports should be given priority at the expense of traffic on lower priority ports. There’s no analysis of what the actual traffic is and in cases where different types of traffic flows over the same port (port 80 for example) it doesn’t offer any benefit at all. The Streamboost engine on the other hand, will actually inspect the packets in real time, determining not only what port the traffic is using, but what the traffic actually is. So for example, Streamboost will be able actually be able to tell that one stream is 1080p YouTube video while another is Standard Definition Netflix traffic, even though they are both on port 80, and give both streams the bandwidth they need.

Once the engine determines what type of data is moving through the connection, it will give that connection the bandwidth it needs to run optimally, but no more. The “no more” piece is important because it frees up bandwidth for other applications and connections. If there is not enough bandwidth available for the “Optimal” setting, it will then drop back and make every effort to give the connection what’s been determined to be the “Minimum acceptable” bandwidth needed for that type of traffic.

How does Streamboost know what bandwidth is Optimal and what bandwidth is Minimum? Well, Qualcomm has studied various types of traffic ranging from YouTube to Netflix to Call of Duty to torrents, and they’ve come up with the Optimal and Minimum bandwidth values for all types of traffic. This data will be included in a “Detection and Policy Table” on the router that the Streamboost engine will reference. My first thoughts when I heard this was that it sounded great, but what happens when that table gets out of date? Qualcomm has thought of that as well and Streamboost includes an opt-in, cloud based service that will keep your router’s table up to date. Not only that, but if the router encounters a new type of traffic not in its table, it will capture a few packets and send them up to the cloud (anonymized of course) to be analyzed and added to future table updates. Your router should actually perform better as it’s table is updated and will be better after a year than it was on Day 1. However, if you’re not interested in being part of the “Opt In crowd”, the engine can also be manually updated at any time.

The UI looks great and will let you drill down into your bandwidth use either by application or device. Speaking of devices, Streamboost can detect the various types of devices on your network and lets you prioritize based on those criteria as well.

D-Link and Alienware are the first two partners onboard with Streamboost and will be showing routers with the technology at CES as well as releasing them this spring. All in all, after speaking to Qualcomm, I think I’m going to hold off my planned router upgrade until I can get my hands on a new router with Streamboost built in.

The media review information supplied to us by ASUS claims the ASUS RT-N56U “Black Diamond” offers “Extreme performance in style.” The router’s “Aesthetic design” has a “Sexy and stylish approach with streamlined, meticulously designed and well-rounded appearance, just like diamonds sparkling and twinkling in the dark.” Now I don’t know about you, but if it’s dark, I’m not sure how you see diamond’s twinkling? But I digress; the RT-N56U is a great looking router, with the black cross hatched lattice surface we liked from previous ASUS routers.

One of the biggest hurdles to implementing quantum cryptography has been vaulted, with researchers finding a way to transmit the key over a non-dedicated connection. Previously because of the inherent noise in a fibre channel transmitting general data the key would be lost and so a separate fibre channel was needed which only the keys were able to transmit but thanks to researchers at Toshiba’s Cambridge Research Laboratory it is now possible to send the keys on existing fibre which also carries other data. They have created a detector which can open for a mere 100 millionths of a micro-second and receive the key, with the detection window being so quick there is not time for noise to interfere and the wrong photon be detected as the key. The Register reports they can transmit keys over a line running at 500kbps for 50km and still have the key properly detected.

"Traditionally it has been necessary to use dedicated fibre to send the single photons (particles of light) that are required for Quantum Key Distribution (QKD). This has restricted any applications of quantum cryptography technology to specialist and small-scale systems in banks and high-level government, essentially because of the extra inconvenience and cost required in allocating a dedicated fibre strand for quantum key distribution."

The short blurb at Slashdot makes WiFox sound more impressive than the actual implementation will be, but for anyone who has attempted to connect to WiFi at a tech show would love to see this new software appear on wireless access points. Once a channel becomes crowded by multiple users, especially if they use devices which like to have a constant connection, the network will hit a point of saturation and the performance of every device on the network will suffer; not just the most recently connected devices. WiFox is a piece of software which can monitor channel saturation and when it is reached it will immediately assign all available bandwidth to the WAP and allow it to transmit all backlogged data before then allocating bandwidth back to the devices ... clearing the tubes as it were. It sounds like this will be easily added to existing WAPs instead of only being available to the next generation of devices so while your WAN will not suddenly become 700 times faster, the WiFi at next conference you go to might just be usable for a change.

"Engineers at NC State University (NCSU) have discovered a way of boosting the throughput of busy WiFi networks by up to 700%. Perhaps most importantly, the breakthrough is purely software-based, meaning it could be rolled out to existing WiFi networks relatively easily — instantly improving the throughput and latency of the network. As wireless networking becomes ever more prevalent, you may have noticed that your home network is much faster than the WiFi network at the airport or a busy conference center. The primary reason for this is that a WiFi access point, along with every device connected to it, operates on the same wireless channel."